Can open science and secrecy coexist?

A six-year wait to get an Air Force document released through Freedom of Information Act channels? For a letter written in 1950? Really?

That was longtime investigator Keith Chester’s experience a few weeks ago, when government censors finally cleared a correspondence from an officer with the USAF’s Directorate of Intelligence to the CIA. And it wasn’t like the Air Force was asking for instructions on how to dispose of corpses; it just wanted the Agency to see if it could obtain 70 feet of UFO footage taken by a TV crew in Louisville, Ky. Sixty-six years later, the request for assistance – not the actual images in question – finally gets declassified.

Data points like these matter because, thanks to the nudge from Hillary Clinton and campaign director John Podesta, the mainstream media is swinging its collective, and so-far superficial, attention to the political ramifications of The Great Taboo for the first time this century. And one of the most unexpected emerging voices to express authentic curiosity about UFOs is former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Mellon.

Two weeks ago, in an interview with author Leslie Kean, and again in The New York Times, a man who also spent more than a decade assessing national security issues for the Senate Intelligence Committee urged readers to seriously re-evaluate an issue long relegated to ridicule and tabloid skank. This wasn’t just a pose. In 2015, Mellon quietly joined the board of UFODATA, a nonprofit working to develop and deploy portable UFO detection technologies through crowdfunding.

But in calling for a clean-slate approach to the mystery – i.e., let’s forge ahead with new science instead of falling back on counterproductive accusations – Mellon has invited considerable skepticism from some researchers who’ve made underground careers using FOIA to dislodge relevant government paper. “In my view,” asserted Mellon, who finds it difficult to believe that UFO secrets could be held under wraps for so many decades, “calling for the end to an alleged government UFO cover-up is almost certainly a dead end, and does not help inspire anyone in government to become more open to the topic.”

That’s probably true. Which agency, organization or foundation wants to launch a good-faith investigation from a defensive posture? But given websites like Project 1947, which showcases layers of the puzzle still being peeled off the onion of World War II, or at the exhaustively detailed Minot AFB UFO and http://www.ufohastings.com/documentary, where scores of military veterans have stepped up to share first-hand accounts of an orchestrated information clampdown, researchers are unmoved by Mellon’s statements about “never detect(ing) the faintest hint of government interest or involvement in UFOs” during his “comprehensive review of DoD’s black programs.”

Brad Sparks, for instance, argues super-secret special access programs (SAP), frequently theorized to be the repositories of government UFO projects – and of which Mellon’s committee had oversight – aren’t the only places to look. “Why limit things to SAPs?” he wonders in an email. “There are ACCMs (Alternative Compensatory Control Measures) that imitate SAPs but are even less accountable, less controlled, and less traceable. There are SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] Codeword Compartments where there is no organization, no project, just the existing intelligence agency org acting on and analyzing data within the SCI Codeword Compartments marked on documents.

“… There are SCI Codeword Compartments that eventually become special projects or SAPs. When Ike created the TALENT-KEYHOLE Control System on Feb. 7, 1958, for recon satellites there was no special project or SAP for it, only the existing CIA and AF orgs. TK was just like a classification marking (TOP SECRET/TALENT-KEYHOLE or TS/TK) but with a whole security system, security agents, manuals, indoctrination, etc. Only in 1960 did the AF create a special project office, in effect a SAP, under that SCI Codeword (TK or TK-CS Control System), which became the nucleus of the NRO in 1961-2.”

Confused? Just wait. Mellon’s contention that, if elected, Clinton “should officially task NORAD with collection and analysis responsibility” provoked an exasperated response from Paul Dean. Firing off FOIAs for years, the tenacious Aussie notes how North American Aerospace Command – a bilateral resource-sharing agreement between Canada and the U.S. – receives its space surveillance data from America’s Strategic Command. In a recent recent blogpost, Dean serves up STRATCOM definitions from a 2004 directive which refers to anomalies as Uncorrelated Targets (UCT). STRATCOM divides these mysteries into four categories: Nonsignificant, Significant, Critical, or False.

The UCT section states the Critical designation applies to “any UCT which is suspected to be related to a new foreign launch.” To qualify for the Critical label, a UCT is required to meet at least one of four criteria. But all four of those criteria are redacted from a document whose original status was classified “Secret.” The origins of UCT terminology go back for decades, and in efforts to get a coherent handle on the intelligence infrastructure monitoring the high frontier, Dean says he and his FOIA collaborators have met institutional resistance every step of the way.

“Everyone thinks about questions of ‘UFO coverup,’” he states in an email, “but they also imagine that the evidence … can be easily served up on a silver platter, like one PDF or one youtube video or whatever. The reality is that it has become backbreaking work. All day I’m disentangling obfuscated, out-of-order, incomplete documentation, filing FOIAs or MDRs, [mandatory declassification review] battling with bureaucracies for every scrap of paper … Nothing can be slapped together willy-nilly.”

Which begs the question: If support builds for the sort of open and legitimate scientific inquiry urged by Chris Mellon, would the success of such a project be contingent upon removing the historical context of secrecy from the discussion? Certainly the UFO transparency campaign proffered by Podesta/Clinton implies secrecy as an obstacle to clarity. Is an honest above-board study possible without trespassing into national security turf? Are we smart enough to strike a balance? And what, exactly, would it take to inspire public confidence in the integrity of such a study?

“Whereas we use technological advances in the service of capitalism and warfare, we have difficulty conceiving that other beings may use them in the service of mutual understanding and brotherhood.”

Some do, some don’t. The yin and the yang. Evil cannot exist without good and vice-versa.

The super rich are addicts that can only serve mammon. They’re no different than a heroin addict in that regard. There is no such thing as enough to them.

But the rub for both is best summed up by Staff Sargent Barnes to Sargent O’Neil; “We all gotta die sometime, Red”. Therein lies the rub.

Death is the great equalizer. If you lived a good life and treated others as you would want to be treated, then there will be a lot of those people waiting to welcome you. I witnessed this reality first hand with my father as he slipped ever closer to the door while he was in hospice. All of his longtime friends who had already passed were coming to see him every night because they were so glad that he’d be with them again soon. After he passed, his Hospice Nurse told me “that was because he was a good man, who lived a good life”.

Guess what happens to bad men who led bad lives and used and abused others?

@albert
This comment hit a nerve and having had a few beers I can get tangential periodically .
If interested, read some of the work by Raymond Moody on “Life after Life”
I have often thought (believed) that there may a vague link between the physical manifestations of UFO’s and the paranormal. Our MSM would never go there.
I do find it interesting in addition to being an animal lover that “our media” has spent an inordinate amount of time pontificating on the unjust death of the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, while continuing to ignore the “great taboo”. Go figure!!

Bill, @freeman,
It’s good that Bill presented the Eastern view of things, and freeman, points to consider regarding alien contact.

Granted, we can learn a lot from Eastern religions and philosophy. Even science! We’ve got acupuncture (and its precursor, shiatsu), herbal medicine (present in all cultures), Qigong is a form of energy healing, transcendental meditation, etc. These things are known as ‘metaphysics’ to a physicist of my acquaintance, but not in a derogatory way.

Metaphysics, as I know it, is a rather large container of unexplained phenomena. It’s a logical approach to the unknown, rather than denial, debunking, or marginalization that exists in the MSM. The MSM functions as a buffer between the general public and science.

Western science is based on reductionist philosophy; explaining system behavior by reducing the system to its constituent parts. A metaphor I used to illustrate this is the computer. Imagine trying to figure out how a very simple computer works by disassembling it, even down to the individual transistors in the CPU. Now we have a map (schematic) of the whole system. By simulating many inputs, we can eventually (in theory) divine what it is doing internally, by watching the interactions between input, memory, and output. Say the computer has only one binary input (a switch) and one binary output (a light), but the output seem to be random, depending on the time between switch closings, and the time the switch is held closed. We know how computers work. This task would be relatively simple (although time-consuming), and independent of any programming language used. To a person with no knowledge of computers, this little black box would seem magical. Faced with a SOTA system with a large complicated program, the task becomes almost impossible, yet this is exactly the problem we face in the study of biological systems.

There’s another issue, and that’s the function of energy in biological systems. More research needs to be done in this area. Rife systems are easily understood, and effective. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is still a ‘black box’. There must be other kinds of energy, as yet unknown to mainstream science.

I suspect that advanced civilizations have full control of these energy systems, and consequently appear to us as real magicians. I know energy-based healing works (and far exceeds the efficacy of any other system), based on 40 years of personal experience.

Perhaps these systems only work for healing, I don’t know, but it seems possible that other, more mundane, tasks might be possible as well, like unlimited power and anti-gravity systems. These are the things the military/industrial sector is working on.

“I am ET” (remember Backstrom). “I want to make formal contact with Earth. How can I do this? I considered landing on the White House lawn (but that didn’t work out so well for Klaatu and Gort*). Is the US the best representative of the world? They seem to be considered a pariah by most countries. I considered the UN, but they are disregarded by any nation at will, and thus have no power. The worlds Power Elite are philosophically similar in regards to wealth extraction, but have yet to unify because of their violent competition. Any use of force by us is not possible, but how long before humans destroy the ecosystem? Time is running out, and we are caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea**. ”

Apollogies for prattling on…
—————–
* we aliens DO have a sense of humor.
** and we like American idiomatic expressions…

I have that particular reductionist mindset. Yes, it’s the basis of science and as a programmer I depend on breaking down problems to create solutions, but I also have to recognise that ‘reality’ may prove to be something magnificently enigmatic.
Do we each navigate our own stream of a multiverse, merely communicating with distant echos of each other?
If nothing begets nothing, then is our universe a subset of everything (but what of mutually exclusive possibilities)?

@albert,
The “Reply” thread quits after three, so this is regarding “how does it help us to know ET exists…etc.”
My contention has always been that ET’s are here to help, despite the multiple claims about abductions, reptilians, genetic harvesting, etc.
I think most of the De Void community (or De Voiders) would agree that we are conversing about beings technologically superior by multiple factors to anything even our most advanced physicists can postulate. That being (hypothetically) so, can we not also imagine that, unlike Earth humanity, this technological advancement flows from an advanced moral, ethical, and spiritual consciousness?
We have it from many of the Oriental spiritual traditions that with an expansion of consciousness in the supermundane realms comes a greater understanding of energies and forces invisible to materialistic science. But in addition to that greater understanding of energies comes a greater understanding of the UNITY of all that is…the interrelationship of all aspects of Creation…from the tiniest particle to a galaxy. This sense of interconnectedness, on a subconscious level, is responsible for the unease that predominates in a culture where the dominating powers work to maintain separation and atomization. Why? Because it maintains the status quo, the ideology of competition and division.
Whereas we use technological advances in the service of capitalism and warfare, we have difficulty conceiving that other beings may use them in the service of mutual understanding and brotherhood.
That is the threat…the threat to a worldwide matrix of competition, exploitation and division created and preserved by a handful of elites who have brought all their resources and power to bear to erect a bulwark against any knowledge of advanced beings who are here to help us create a simpler, saner, more just world.
I posit that if the Visitors, with their demonstrated advanced technology, were at the same level of selfishness and viciousness as Earth humanity, they would’ve destroyed themselves long before coming here.
No, they have something to teach. That scares the bejesus out of the powers-that-be.

(I’m wondering if there are SETI forums that host discussions like this, because if not, there should be!)

Can open science and secrecy coexist? On a small scale one would have to say no, but we’re dealing with world-wide phenomena. When a single country is affected, there’s a division between the minority of (potential) secret-keepers and the rest of us, with a few who take a keen interest. As long as there are events to investigate then independent research is possible. Anecdotal evidence suggests that any materials (would) have been secreted away, which would inhibit progress massively, but not totally. And as already mentioned, military witnesses and the work of Robert Hastings, are extremely significant.

What does it benefit us to know ‘aliens exist’? If they’re traveling extreme distances with relative ease then it would help science to know this is possible that there are technological solutions. It would also spur extrasolar exploration.

Conspiracies happen. Is there a conspiracy to hide UFO/alien events/contact? I don’t know, but bizarrely, it seems possible, if not probable, based on credible testimony. (There’s certainly a motive when one considers the implications.)
Why would aliens not make direct contact? The more one looks at the possible reasons, the more it seems the most rational course of action i.e. not to. Once formal contact is made, there’s no going back and the ultimate consequences may not be predictable…

Could all aliens and alien agendas be beneficent? If solutions to all problems could be predicted/calculated and the answers were always beneficial to all parties, then one would say yes, but that isn’t how our universe works (even with quantum computing). Our reality is a complex system, a massively interconnected web of causes and effects. One (inevitable?) outcome is evolution-through-natural-selection, which promotes diversity and is based on competition for resources. In that respect, biological entities in this universe are stuffed from the get-go, whatever planet you’re from.
Even if we imagine a world like Asimov’s Erythro, or his Green Patches tale, the Borg or Hive from Agents of Shield, then a single unified organism will represent one point of view and it will still not be able to predict every consequence of all actions taken.

Balance is perhaps the most we can hope to achieve, not perfection. Governments and militaries have power and influence, but not total control.
On a cynical note, how do we know that an alien party promoting a cessation to nuclear research isn’t hoping to inhibit our progress so that we are unable to avoid/escape an extinction level event? How would we know that an apparently advanced alien is the true representative of a larger body, one with our best interests in mind?
Formal alien contact will be the most significant event in human history, but life will only become more complicated.

At the risk of repeating what I said elsewhere, I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:

Disclosure will come from within the organization responsible (the CIA?)

Look at Hastings work. One of the best, if not the best UFO reports ever. Does anyone think this could have happened soley with FOIA requests? The gov’t has -nothing- to lose by classifying -everything- for ‘national security’ reasons. The GOV/LE/MSM elite have been reasonably successful in their fear-mongering propaganda. That makes overclassification much easier.

“Why do you say that hibernating bear is dangerous?”
“Well, watch what happens when I poke him with a stick!”

Few scientists and journalists are willing to sacrifice their careers/lives (on the altar of UFO information disclosure). The fact that Snowden and Manning (and Assange) did means it can be done.

It certainly won’t be Hillary R. I don’t have a clue what Trump would do. It would be interesting to see Trump as POTUS. Maybe I’ll vote for him…
. .. . .. — ….

While it has now become very obvious that disclosure is already occurring in a very slow and gradual manner, the CIA is far from being the “only” Agency responsible. In many ways, the NSA makes the CIA look like neophytes by comparison. And there is no way that any Agency will ever willingly provide full disclosure.

I didn’t mean to imply that the CIA is alone in the field of study, only that they may the repository or clearing house. NORAD, the NRO, DIA, various arms of the USAF (Like Space Command) are no doubt involved in data collection. The NSA is a communications collector. Could they be intercepting classified communications from other agencies regarding UFOs? I gotta think that there’s -some- internal compartmentalization going on within those TLAs. After Snowden, there’s probably a lot.

albert, larry, et. al.,
Then we have people like Dr. Greer, who insist (based on their alleged high-level contacts) that there’s also a matrix of corporate contractors in the ‘defense’ sector that are actively engaged in R&D based on technologies observed in recovered ET spacecraft.
Also, the vested interests in the energy generation industries who might be aware that the whole damn subject is a potential threat to their domination, wealth and power.
I think the more we dig into the cover-up phenomenon we find it’s not about protecting the public from mass panic, but protecting huge vested interests from loss of power and control.

Seems like the wrong people are always in charge, and the powerful are least likely to have that power wrested from them. I’m not sure about R & D being done on ET technology. If this is so, then the technology really is indistinguishable from magic, or we don’t have our best people working on it, or maybe scientists aren’t as smart as they think they are. Surely the military would be using such technology by now.

I think there may be scramble for -access- to alien technology. If there were to be an ET invasion, the smart money is on doing it before we destroy ourselves and make the planet uninhabitable. We’ve already passed the tipping point.

How does it help us to know ETs exist, if we can gain nothing from them?
. .. . .. — ….

“Certainly the UFO transparency campaign proffered by Podesta/Clinton implies secrecy as an obstacle to clarity.”

Followed by:

“Is an honest above-board study possible without trespassing into national security turf?”

Billy, I commend you for your attempt at somehow trying to hold onto some thin thread of optimism. But the answer to the question that you’re asking, is an obvious no. And the fact that Hillary (and her handler Podesta) chose a late night entertainment talk show to clearly answer your question, says it all.

It’s just further in your face evidence of The Hegelian Dialectic at work in every facet of our society. The “thesis”, the “anti-thesis”, and the “solution” (aka/ synthesis). Of course the solution being that “national security” trumps everything and whichever side of the dialectic you might foolishly decide to take, all of us as Americans regardless of whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, or a Liberal or a Conservative, we all have to agree that in the interest of national security there is only so much we can be allowed to know.

This solution is then further bolstered and entrenched into the group mind think by the advent and ever more increasing use of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” by the MSM. As I’ve said before, when it comes to the UFO/ET phenomenon it’s the new and greatly improved modern day version of “swamp gas”.

Therefore ultimate control is ensured. The powers that be are Master Blaster in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” who forces Aunty Entity to publicly answer “Yes” to the question: “Who rules Bartertown”, before he agrees to lift the embargo.

So all of this ends up with the venerable Billy Cox having to ask a question which has already been clearly answered.

Years ago, over at least two decades now, Robert Todd put in a FOIA request to the CIA for all letters to the USAF, 1947-52. It wasn’t answered during his life time. I took his original request to the National Archives and was told I would have an answer within a week. At the end of a week I got over 250 pages of letter from the CIA to the AF. I also got a letter that a number of letters were redacted, but no hint of there subject. It took Chester 6 years just to break this 1950 from the AF to the CIA. The answer from the CIA back to the AF should have been in the original Todd requested FOIA. Now what? Another FOIA to the CIA for document that should have already been released. A life time could be spent with still no answer at this rate.

It’s an imperfect system, but you and others have managed to obtain information that the rest of us wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. So, thank you for that.

My own recent experience includes being told by the MoD that they wouldn’t respond to any more of my radar data requests, but after an appeal I received an apology. The people who respond to FOIA requests are a mixed bunch of personalities and compentence.

On a weird note: I often think that people don’t appreciate the likely (greater) complexity of alien societies and cultures. Too often the concept of ET is reduced to a stereotype. The complexity of our systems, practices and breakdowns-in-communication may help put the potential ‘alien situation’ into context. (And that’s not even considering the added complexity of multiple alien societies potentially hanging around the solar system and interacting with each other.)

I just received an initial response from OGIS relating to my appeal to the USAF (that was ignored) that I sent in response to the USAF’s sudden refusal to release RADES data.
Apparently OGIS has no powers (much like the ICO over here), but at least someone from OGIS is going to speak to them about the issue.

I can almost visualize that conversation:
OGIS: “Hey, um, we’ve got a complaint over here about you folks hoarding radar data that used to be public, even a decade after 9/11. I think the guy’s looking for UFOs. What should we tell him?”
USAF: “Jesus, we don’t even have an unpaid intern program anymore, staffing’s down 40 percent from a year ago and, screw it, whatever, I don’t care anymore.”
OGIS: “So, like, national security, right?”
USAF: “National security, compromising sources, ways and means, really, whatever, I’m late for my team-building meeting, ok?”

Its another case of optimism over experience from where I’m standing too, and for every level of management this issue passes through, it has a greater likelihood of being batted aside… okay, I admit it, it’s practically hopeless, but this is a pretty miraculous universe, so, who knows.

Someone may have covered this point alreaady, but having someone with the experience of C.M. on the board of UFODATA would probably help with raising funds. He’s got the kind of CV that a wealthy investor would want to see.

On a totally different note, has anyone seen the latest article in New Scientist about superhabitable planets? They seem to revisit this topic. Apparently the theories concerning solar system formation support the notion that our solar system isn’t even the most life-friendly type that’s out there.
(Our single example of a life-bearing world, is looking less special every day.)

…I’m confused. Does the info Hastings has uncovered with the help of FOIA re: UAPs or UCTs over ICBM AFBs get classified TS/TK or does a USAF CO or someone in USAF DoI or a mid-level officer with ADHD send it on the QT ASAP to CIA HQ where it becomes an ATS SCI or ACCI and is slipped into the FYEO file for those with NtK clearance?
IMO the whole damn mess is FUBAR. But, then, WTH do I know.

These are your tax dollars at work 🙂
But its curiously funny that these systems-for-maintining-secrecy are being revealed by research into UFOs.
On a dodgy political note: the methods of the secret squirrels are easier to comprehend than the strategy of allegedly protecting the lives of U.S. citizens by killing Pakistanis with drones, while at the same time denying a significant proportion of U.S. citizens access to basic medical support (although the latter appears to be improving slowly).
If humans are involved, its going to be SNAFU.

Former CIA life sciences officer Kit Green has called the rumor of contact with non-human intelligence the CORE STORY, presumably after the level above TOP SECRET and SAP is known as CORE SECRET. It was implied that at this level, where the ultimate secrets are kept from most of the government, there is no classified paper trail, with the core secrets shared verbally among a very limited select group of individuals on a strict need to know basis.

So, do you think anything good is going to come from the Federal government until people come to understand what the MSM have done to them for the last couple decades? The only way to change this is for people to come to realize what the government has been up to. They’d lie to us about all of this, and cover-up for the people who committed mass murder on 9/11, there is no way there are going to reveal anything important about UFOs or aliens willingly.

Wasn’t it Dr Maccabee who said that after giving a lecture within the CIA he was told that he’d created spies on the inside who were looking for UFO-related information?
All of these secrecy protocols are designed to stop the left hand knowing what the right is doing; so we can all appreciate that yelling ‘conspiracy’ at people who know nothing, will not engender a spirit of co-operation.

What is apparent is that the military, more than any other group, tend to experience UAP and that consequences ensue, sometimes including documentation. (There is far less info in the UK, but I guess it’s a matter of bad luck, as documents like ships logs seem to get blown away in gusts of wind and files go missing from offices.)

I say ‘bravo’ to anyone pursuing information via FOIA or anyone attempting to investigate through instrumentation. ‘Secrecy within a bureaucracy’ is a phenomenon at least as complex as UAP!

Too much confusing data for an old guy like me to entangle from my brain non entangled (I hope) plaques. I do seem to recall that Kean has succinctly advocated that the only way “forward” is to……….go forward.Disregard the secrecy and frustration over the bureaucratic red tape in addition to placing government officials on the defensive. Time to go forward in a prospective fashion. What happened in the past 70 years will not be undone thru further “head batting” inquiries The authors and investigators here have done due diligence and have alerted the readership in this area that much was suppressed for obvious reasons.

The masters at the top understand both 9/11 and UFO secrecy, and if they don’t they haven’t actually been at the top. There is more headway with 9/11. NIST are basically at their wits-end. Their report requires that there weren’t extreme temperatures throughout the building. Yet, the obvious fact is that there were with metal weapons fused into concrete (no, your grill or fire pit won’t do that). The whole thing is rotten. Their disinfo machine on UFOs is up and running at full steam at this late hour. They must either not know or not care that our own government was obviously in cahoots (one single girder getting knocked off its seat to make a whole building, building 7, come down like it was just in a professional demolition, come on). Yet NIST claims releasing the computer model data on the structural failure of a building would jeopardize public safety (Orwellian double speak at its height).

Clearly, the government is the public safety risk, and any attempt to play nice about this isn’t going to work, who would callously murder 3,000 of their own citizens, with many more deaths to come related to the way that the Towers were demolished. If people in charge of guarding the ET knowledge are truly unaware in this regard, it is well past time to wake up.